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This post is a recording of a fast and furious guitar performance of a fiddle tune called “Kiss My Lady” which was transcribed in 1800 (or so) by a ship’s musician named William Litten.
Musically I wanted something energetic and raw. I didn’t care about mistakes except if they were bad enough to really mar the listening. The final performance definitely has mistakes, and both my dogs got into the action by barking.It usually takes me a lot of takes to get something with the right feel and no fatal mistakes. In this case I did a few takes a day for a few days before I got one I liked.
I don’t have sheet music for this because I got it from a book which is not online. Here’s the story.Litten was employed as a ship’s musician, and along the way he wrote down a lot of music. I think that this was more like a notebook to aid his memory than a book for the public. His manuscript was brought home to Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, by a local guy named Allen Coffin. The Martha’s Vineyard economy was based on fishing, sailing, etc, until it became a touristy beach destination in the late 20th century, and Coffin was probably on the ship with Litten. The manuscript ended up in the library of the historical society in Edgartown, the biggest town on the island.
In the 1970s a musicologist named Gail Huntington copied it into more readable notation, made some corrections and other tidying up, cross-referenced the songs in contemporaneous publications, and eventually published it. Her publication is copyright 1977 by Hines Point Publishers, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts 02568. This was either self-publishing or a very small-time operation.
Here’s a description of the situation by somebody else familiar with the book:
William Litten was a ship’s fiddler in Royal Navy in the first years of the nineteenth century. What makes Litten remarkable amongst his peers was his ability to transcribe music. In the years 1800 to 1802 he was aboard the HMS Gorgon, leaving England in May 1800, arriving in China in February 1801 and passing through St Helena in 1802. During the voyage he wrote down much of his repertoire, thus giving us a unique snapshot of the musical and, in particular, the fiddle repertoire of his time. The original and now unprocurable book was assembled and published in 1977. Extensive searches failed to find the publishers. The book was reproduced from a copy on interlibrary loan from New Mexico for the purposes of study at a a workshop at the National Folk Festival in Canberra in 2006. A few copies remain and are offered here.
The copyright situation of the sheet music is messy. Huntington’s substantive contributions to the original entitle her to a copyright on her contributions. However figuring out what is a copyrighted addition and what is a public domain part of the original is totally up in the air. Since she and her publisher seem to have disappeared, this has turned into an orphaned work. The good news is that a public domain performance of the underlying composition and arrangement is completely legal as far as I can tell.
My own copyrights in these recordings are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license per my boilerplate licensing statement.
Direct audio file links
These are the real keepers:
Kiss My Lady sept 23 2007 (mp3)
Kiss My Lady sept 23 2007 (vorbis)
These are scratch recordings that I figured might be handy for sampling or comparison:
Kiss My Lady sept 20 2007 (mp3)
Kiss My Lady sept 20 2007 (vorbis)
Great track, great playing. Keep it comin.
ian
Perhaps it is Gale Huntington, a man from MA and self-taught musicologist who passed away a few years ago.
Citation to a published obituary in a folk journal:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8715(199421)107%3A424%3C282%3AOEGH(%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3
Wow. I am in awe. Thank you.
Here’s a bit more from the Portuguese Wikipedia:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&u=http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale_Huntington&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=4&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DObituary:%2B%2522Gale%2BHuntington%2522%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3Dyxj%26sa%3DG%26pwst%3D1
I notice that I misspelled it as Gail rather than Gale, and that the spelling on the book is Gale. So my mind read it as a woman’s name and rewrote the spelling.
From the obituary:
So Gale was 76 when this book was published.
Hey
Nice tune ‘Kiss my lady’. I like the tone of the guitar very, very much and the way the player holds the notes and gets a subtle vibrato is gorgeous – I don’t think the vibrato is intentional it’s more of a musical signature of the player. Sure there’s a slight timing issue here and there, and also the odd beat dropped but I know what it’s like when you turn on a mike, throw a chart in front of you and say ‘play’..overall it’s captured the flavour of the tune and it’s quite a unique end result.
I think the icing on the cake is what sounds like a dog barking at about 1.29.
I’ll be back to explore this a little more
TH
I liked the tidbit that Mr. Huntington was such a devotee to local history that they named a museum after him. That kind of little regional museum is just the kind I like to see–and I imagine one of the few epitaphs worth ‘taphing is to have a little museum or library named for one.
Thanks for the plug and I think you are right to assume it is an orphaned work. My research could find no company or organisation that had taken over the copyright.
Nice interpretation of Kiss My Lady.
Dave
Thanks for stopping by, Dave. It’s great that you are helping the book to survive.
My copy of the book has the same orange cover as yours, by the way. I think that I bought the book in the late 90s while I was living in Massachusetts, so right near the publisher.